There are five stages, and only the first needs anything much from you.

1. Scope and checks. We agree what we’re doing each month, then complete due diligence and anti-money-laundering checks. That’s identity documents and a short conversation about the business.
2. Engagement and authority. You sign the engagement letter and give written consent for us to contact your current accountant. HMRC agent authorisations are set up in parallel.
3. Professional clearance. We write to the outgoing firm, asking whether there is any professional reason we shouldn’t act, and requesting the handover information.
4. Records collection. Files come in from the outgoing firm, from you, from the software and, where needed, from HMRC.
5. Transition plan. We agree who does what from which date, and when the first month-end closes under the new routine.

Stages one and two take a week when everyone replies. Stage three is the one that drifts, because it depends on somebody else’s inbox.

Nothing about your VAT returns, payroll or filing deadlines pauses while this runs. The dates keep coming, so the plan has to say who is covering the next one.

Professional clearance is a letter between two accountants, and it does two jobs.

The first is ethical. We ask the outgoing accountant whether there is anything we should know before accepting the work. Most replies are a single line saying there isn’t.

The second is practical. The same letter requests the information we need to pick the work up mid-stream: the last filed accounts, the trial balance, the tax computations and the workings behind the opening balances.

Here’s the part owners don’t expect. The letter is a professional courtesy, and no accountant is obliged to answer it quickly. The professional bodies expect members to pass over reasonable handover information even where fees are in dispute, so a bill you’re arguing about is not a valid reason to hold the lot back.

Ownership matters too. Your books and ledgers belong to your business. The outgoing firm’s working papers and their software licence belong to them. That distinction explains most refusals, and it’s why we ask for the underlying data rather than a set of PDFs.

A vague request gets a vague answer, usually a PDF of the current year and little else.

We ask for specific items, because each one closes a gap we’d otherwise have to rebuild by hand:

• Bank statements and feed history for the last two years, every account.
• The trial balance at the last year end, and the last accounts filed at Companies House.
• The full nominal ledger or an export of the accounting data, rather than summary reports.
• Debtor and creditor listings, aged, with the detail behind each balance.
• The fixed asset register and the capital allowance pools.
• Payroll records, pension scheme details and the auto-enrolment correspondence.
• VAT workings for the returns already filed, including any partial exemption calculation.
• Corporation tax computations and any losses carried forward.

Grant-funded organisations add two more: the funding register and the evidence packs behind claims already submitted. Funders ask about prior years, and the answer has to survive somebody else’s handover.

Old debtor balances are the ones I check first. They’re frequently items paid long ago and never cleared, which quietly overstates what you’re owed.

We do, and the handover carries no separate charge.

That covers the clearance letter, the records collection, the coordination with your current accountant or bookkeeper, a written map of who is responsible for what, and a transition plan agreed around your year end. It’s the same for every new client, whether you’re an owner-managed business or a grant-funded organisation.

The chasing is a routine rather than a hope. The letter goes out, we allow a fortnight, then follow up weekly, switching from email to phone if the email is being ignored. There’s a point at which we stop waiting and rebuild from the bank data, the software and HMRC’s own records instead.

Why give this away. Because the handover is where I see the records properly for the first time, and that’s worth more to me than an hour of billing. It’s also the honest position: if switching costs you time and money on top of the fee, plenty of owners stay somewhere they’ve outgrown. More on how that works on our switching accountants page.

It happens often enough that we plan for it rather than react to it.

The common version is a set of PDFs for the current year, no data file, and a note that the software licence has been released. Sometimes the underlying records have already been deleted to free up a seat.

Your obligation to keep records doesn’t transfer with the files, which is the uncomfortable part. Under Making Tax Digital the digital record has to exist, and “our previous accountant deleted it” is a poor answer to an enquiry.

So we rebuild. Bank statements give us every transaction that moved. HMRC holds the returns already submitted. Your own systems, invoices, delivery notes, payroll reports, fill most of the rest. It takes longer than a clean handover and it usually surfaces something: an unreconciled balance, a supplier account with two versions of itself, income recorded once in a summary and never in the ledger.

That rebuild is month one of the ninety-day onboarding, set out in what happens in the first 90 days.